This country could sure use an anti-Pence.Different as they are when it comes to religion, Pence and Buttigieg are more widely separated when it comes to their approach to government and politics. Pence campaigned three times before he won election but once he got into his first office, Congress, he did little active governing.
Indeed, during 12 years in office he didn't author a single successful bill. His single term as governor of Indiana was noteworthy mainly for the RFRA debacle and his inattention to problems, including a water pollution crisis in East Chicago and an HIV outbreak in the rural southern part of the state.
In contrast to Pence, Buttigieg has been an active, ball-of-fire mayor who built and refurbished more than 1,000 abandoned homes in 1,000 days and then led the rebirth of a dying downtown. South Bend became a Rust Belt success story. An old Studebaker plant is a center for high-tech start-ups and Buttigieg is trying to bring the train line that connects South Bend airport to Chicago into the city center.
During a campaign day in January, he waxed poetic on the global need for longer-lasting asphalt, and detoured to inspect a business that's a combination thrift store and restaurant.
If you have trouble imagining Mike Pence getting excited about highway paving materials or soul food sold alongside used suits, you are not alone. Pence is a careful politician who guards his image and rarely leaves his lane.
Joining Donald Trump's ticket in 2016 marked an unusual departure as the pairing aligned him with a man known for profanity, three marriages, and awful talk about sexually assaulting women.
[...]
Pence's choice to join the ticket, and the hypocrisy it suggests, is what Buttigieg was referencing as he wondered what prompted Pence to become a "cheerleader for the porn star presidency." The vice president's cheerleading has been consistent, even as Trump's scandals have accumulated. And even when Pence is silent, he practically beams with apparent admiration when he is in the President's presence.
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Buttigieg clearly took a cue from fellow Democrats who objected when former Vice President Joe Biden called him a "decent guy." After some pushback on social media about his comment, Biden tweeted that he "was making a point in a foreign policy context." RFRA and Pence's commitment to an especially conservative form of Christianity that condemns gays and nonbelievers, are not, in the eyes of many liberals, signs of decency. They are, instead, indicators of intolerance at a level that cannot be obscured by a soft voice or a warm smile.
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Indiana-based political writer Adam Wren told me the two other Republican governors who have worked with Buttigieg got along very well with him. He explains this by noting that the mayor is, in fact, a more authentic Hoosier than the Bible-thumping Pence.
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Buttigieg's authenticity is the difference between serving in the military, as he did in Afghanistan, and talking tough about defense, as the vice president often does. Wren, who recently profiled Buttigieg for Indianapolis magazine, said he is a practical guy who loves to talk about the gritty value of "smart sewer systems" and believes Christianity is a matter of action as well as belief.
Indeed, the South Bend mayor is direct, hard-working, and practical; he doesn't just talk about his Midwest values, he applies them. This makes him the anti-Pence.
CNN
And from that Adam Wren article in Indianapolis Monthly...
Buttigieg transformed the Rust Belt town dubbed one of “America’s Dying Cities” by Newsweek in 2011, less than two weeks before a 29-year-old Buttigieg declared his candidacy to become mayor of his hometown, the youngest mayor of an American city of at least 100,000 at that time.
[...]
Pete Buttigieg is running. Today, it’s along the St. Joseph River on a crisp and gray October morning in South Bend, as the mayor tried to clear his mind in the middle of a packed day. A meeting with the NAACP. A meeting with staff to discuss the city’s $368 million budget, which is scheduled to go in front of the City Council in a few days. And some political time. He’s trying to get back into shape. He’s working his way up from 5 miles a day to 9. That’s what he ran when he was deployed with the Navy as a counterterrorism intelligence officer in Afghanistan, where he set his half-marathon personal record of 1:42 back in Bagram, a pace of about 7:46 per mile. “It’s actually a hauntingly beautiful place, and the daylight started to come up over the mountains and it was March or April so it was still snow-capped peaks,” Buttigieg says. “The best race of my life.”
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Buttigieg has become a dark horse for the Democratic nomination, one who trades calls with former Vice President Joe Biden, lands plaudits as the future of the Democratic Party from former President Barack Obama, emails with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, keeps counsel with former Obama strategist Axelrod, and has Lis Smith, the New York City–based, celebrity Democrat-communications guru, on a five-figure retainer.
Axelrod is the one who, upon seeing the mayor’s campaign for Democratic National Committee chair in 2017, thought Smith could help bring his message to the masses. “He speaks the language of the heartland,” Axelrod says. “He is a very gifted guy in a very understated way.” At the same time, Martin O’Malley, the 2016 presidential contender and former mayor of Baltimore, was also playing matchmaker between the mayor and the consultant. Smith had worked on O’Malley’s ultimately unsuccessful presidential bid. “He was just a total breath of fresh air and struck me as exactly what we needed in our party after the worst election cycle of my lifetime,” Smith says. “He had a different type of profile—young Midwestern mayor, a unique bio, and a really compelling message that should’ve been more front-and-center in 2016.
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A Buttigieg campaign would also seek to do more than just be a referendum on Trump by outlining benefits to would-be Democratic voters. [A] universal basic income, for example. It would be a positive campaign that wouldn’t be framed by Trump, who Buttigieg wrote in a December 2016 Medium essay was a “thin-skinned authoritarian who is not liberal, nor conservative, nor moderate.” The suffocating Trump news cycle, he says, “is like a computer virus. It ties up all the processing power of the national psyche and the press and people like me.”
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In February, Buttigieg [released] his first book, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor’s Challenge and a Model for America’s Future.
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It’s a meditation on what it means to be Midwestern as much as it is a story of how to revive a down-on-its-luck city in the industrial heartland—the kind of story any Democrat who thinks it’s important to win Trump voters in red states such as Indiana should study.
[...]
It’s short on policy prescriptions, and long on keen social observation. His thesis: “Resentment and nostalgia are not the only formula for the industrial Midwest,” he told me, “or for struggling communities in general.” To show that Democrats can succeed in states like Indiana, he points to the records of progressive figures such as Terre Haute’s Eugene V. Debs, the labor leader who showed that “a century ago, the left was arguably being led from the Midwest. Treating the middle of the country like unshakably Republican territory would serve us poorly in the long run.”
[...]
[As a child] Buttigieg was chubby. Awkward. [...] His best friend had a developmental disability, which he says made him reflect a lot on the nature of “free will and self-destination.”
In 2000, when he was 18 and the president of his senior class at Saint Joseph High School in South Bend, an essay won him $3,000 and an all-expenses-paid trip to Boston that May for the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Essay Contest. Attending a private Catholic school, Buttigieg was surrounded by Kennedy’s legend, which was on par with that of Lincoln’s.
[...]
Buttigieg chose Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, 16 years before his presidential run. A nine-member committee, including luminaries such as the Pulitzer prize–winning historian David McCullough and the late Senator Ted Kennedy, plucked Buttigieg’s essay about Sanders from a pile of 600 entries as the winner. “Cynical candidates have developed an ability to outgrow their convictions in order to win power,” Buttigieg wrote at the time. “Cynical citizens have given up on the election process, going to the polls at one of the lowest rates in the democratic world.”
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He went to Harvard University [where he] hung around the school’s Institute of Politics, where he attended events with politicos like Rick Davis, John McCain’s 2000 campaign manager, steeped himself in the study of government, and learned Arabic.
After graduating in 2004, he did research for the Kerry-Edwards campaign and worked for former Defense Secretary William Cohen as a conference planner. In the summer of 2005, he sharpened his language skills in a Tunis classroom, where he took a course in Arabic. [...] Later, he won a Rhodes Scholarship that took him to Oxford for two years, when he studied analytic philosophy, politics, and economics, taking an honors degree in 2007. All of which he put to use back in Chicago in 2007, where he worked for three years at McKinsey & Co., the storied management consultancy, where his salary was more than double his mayoral salary of $102,000. His area of specialty was relatively mundane juxtaposed with his vaunted credentials: grocery store pricing.
[...]
That year, he also went to Iowa to knock on doors for Obama. In a rural setting, Buttigieg saw teenagers getting ready to deploy. He had a grandfather who was a pilot in the Navy. One of his prize possessions is his flight log. And it hit him. He needed to enlist, which he did in 2009. “I can count on one hand the number of people I knew at Harvard at the time who served,” Buttigieg says. “So you took that plus the fact that there’s a family tradition, plus the fact that when I was at Oxford I got to know people at the Naval Academy and just admired the hell out of those guys.
[...]
[When Buttigieg] was first elected in 2011 [it] was days after Newsweek ran the “Dying Cities” story, which caused a minor stir in the city. “More than 50 years ago, South Bend, Ind., was a hub of manufacturing, largely due to the presence of the Studebaker car company,” the piece read. “But by the early 1960s, the company had closed up shop in South Bend for good, plunging this area into a long and steep downturn that continues today, though it’s a bit more muted than in previous decades. What is particularly troubling for this small city is that the number of young people declined by 2.5 percent during the previous decade, casting further doubt on whether this city will ever be able to recover.”
[...]
[He] was gone for seven months of [his first term] in 2014 because of his military obligations. In Afghanistan, Buttigieg was a liaison officer, which meant he did a lot of intelligence work at the base in Bagram. Often, he had to drive his commander around Kabul, risking running over an IED. He did more than 100 trips outside the wire. On the base, he managed [South Bend] over email.
[...]
Buttigieg is a fan of HBO’s Game of Thrones. He also enjoys listening to Radiohead and has a self-aware sense of humor. When I asked him for some of his other favorite shows, he mentions Occupied, a Norwegian political thriller from Netflix. “Nothing says ‘man of the people’ like a Norwegian political thriller,” Buttigieg told me, as we drove around town one day last fall in his silver 2015 Chevy Cruze. [ed note: I binged that show on Netflix and can recommend it There are a few Norwegian series on Netflix that have been good. Also, I like Norwegian crime thriller novels. They're - I hesitate to say more sophisticated, but maybe that's it, definitely more thoughtful - than their American counterparts.]
[...]
When Buttigieg came into office, he proposed [...] tearing down 1,000 dilapidated houses in 1,000 days. Using $10.5 million from a HUD grant, Buttigieg went to work. Jack Colwell, a longtime columnist for the South Bend Tribune, thought the premise was crazy. But the houses—vacant for at least 90 days—depressed property values and increased the likelihood of crime. Some had become crack houses. It was a psychological victory for the city. His governing philosophy is “rooted in kind of a mixture of hope and just accountability,” says Colwell. “Just getting shit done.”
[...]
In June 2015, an election year and not long after Governor Mike Pence signed his Religious Freedom Restoration Act, Buttigieg decided to come out as gay. He told his parents and friends first. And then he wrote an editorial for the South Bend Tribune. He won reelection with more than 80 percent of the vote.
[...]
Indiana Republicans have attacked Buttigieg for his time away from the state, calling him “Part-Time Peter,” a Trumpian nickname that might indicate the South Bend mayor is a real threat. “I don’t think too many people care about him spending time away,” Colwell, the South Bend columnist, told me. “A lot of people here are kind of proud of it.”
[...]
In 2019, he could be one of at least three possible Democratic mayors to run for president, alongside New Orleans’s former head, Mitch Landrieu, and Los Angeles’s Eric Garcetti. “The interesting thing is it’s gonna be a while before we even know what lanes people will resolve themselves into. It may not be ideological. I’m surprised there aren’t more people in the mix from this part of the country, kind of the heartland.”
[...]
Even if he [loses in] the Democratic primary, many see him landing a plum cabinet position. You don’t have to try too hard to imagine the former management consultant running a federal agency like the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development—or even the vice presidency.
[...]
“A lot of times during [my failed run for the DNC chair],” Buttigieg told Rolling Stone, “I would joke that as the left-handed, red-state, Oxford-educated, Maltese-American military veteran in the race—well, if I tried to understand my place in the world strictly through identity, it would be pretty confusing for me, not to mention for others. And pretty hard for others to identify with too.”
Indianapolis Monthly
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